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Historical Understanding and the Human Sciences UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works Title Historical Understanding and the Human Sciences Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/24g4s98c Journal Journal of the Philosophy of History, 1 Author Bevir, Mark Publication Date 2007 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Historical Understanding and the Human Sciences By Mark Bevir I. CONTACT INFORMATION Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Email: [email protected] II. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Mark Bevir is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999) and New Labour: A Critique (2005), and co-author, with R. A. W. Rhodes, of Interpreting British Governance (2003) and Governance Stories (2006). 1 Historical Understanding and the Human Sciences Historical understanding (verstehen ) has to do with grasping the intentional content attached to human actions. 1 It is a distinctive approach to the human sciences, typically based on the idea that the meaningful nature of human action requires a distinct epistemology in the form of historical understanding. Philosophers who study historical understanding have generally focused on three interwoven but analytically distinctive concerns. The first concern is to articulate the ontological conditions for the possibility and grounds of historical understanding. The second is to clarify the epistemological nature of historical understanding itself: What does it mean to understand actions that took place in the past? The final concern is to specify the role of understanding in historical explanation: Does understanding have to be accompanied by additional explanatory operations in order to secure its empirical validity? The papers in this special issue concentrate primarily on the third issue, and they do so against the background of post-positivism. How does post-positivism alter the ways in which we should think about the place of culture and meaning, and the role of understanding and interpretation, within explanations in the human sciences? The purpose of this introductory essay is mainly to describe the tradition of historical understanding, but also briefly to locate the ensuing essays within that tradition. I challenge two myths about verstehen . The first myth is that verstehen is just a method for the production of historical facts. The second is that verstehen is an intuitive, quasi- mystical operation that resembles the work of an artist more than that of a scientist. In place of these myths, I emphasize the philosophical content of verstehen conceived as an 2 analysis of what it means to base the human sciences on recognition of the meaningful character of human action. Hermeneutics and History In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, German philosophers drew on the rich, multifaceted traditions of German idealism and hermeneutics to discuss the philosophical foundations of the human sciences and their relationship to the natural sciences. These discussions produced some of the classical statements on historical understanding. Wilhelm Dilthey’s work had a profound impact on approaches to the human sciences within the hermeneutic tradition. Max Weber’s work became a starting point for many subsequent debates on the matter within the social sciences. What is more, the German discussions helped to inspire similar ones throughout Europe, including, by way of the Italian Benedetto Croce, the work of the British philosopher, R. G. Collingwood. Wilhelm Dilthey Given that historical understanding concerns the intentionality of human action, it is not surprising that discussions of its philosophical principles arose against the background of idealism and hermeneutics. The idealists stressed (albeit in different ways) the primacy of mind over matter in human existence and so attempts to understand that existence. Hermeneutics was preoccupied with questions of understanding externally given linguistic formations (mainly written texts but also spoken communication and 3 even entire grammatical structures and literary genres) by grasping the mental content expressed within them. Wilhelm Dilthey was the first major thinker in both the idealist and hermeneutic traditions to attempt a systematization of the theory of historical understanding. Dilthey anchors both the possibility and the necessity of historical understanding in ontological arguments. According to his ontology, human life differs from the rest of the natural world in that it consists of an inner world that gets expressed in outer manifestations such as gestures, words, music, poetry, churches, and universities. Understanding, he adds, is the process of grasping the inner content to which outer expressions refer back. It is only by such understanding, moreover, that humans are able to live, act, and communicate in a society. Understanding is a fundamental presupposition of individual and social life. This ontology leads Dilthey to define the human sciences in terms of historical understanding. He concludes that the human sciences, like human life as such, are about understanding expressions; they are about grasping the inner content of outer manifestations. How does Dilthey conceive of the process of historical understanding? At times Dilthey identifies understanding with an intuitive and imaginative re-creation of inner contents in one’s psyche, based upon analogy with one’s own lived experiences and enhanced by “a sympathy with everything human.” 2 Scholars should “transfer ” themselves “into a given complex of manifestations of life” in a way that enables them actually to experience the temporal flow of historical events within their own psyche. 3 In his later writings, however, Dilthey downplayed the importance of individual psychic processes. Instead he placed “objective spirit” at the center of historical understanding. Objective spirit refers to the ensemble of objectifications (outer manifestations) that 4 comprise a society at a certain epoch. For Dilthey, all these objectifications share “a common stock of ideas, attitudes, and ideals,” which “even the work of a genius will reflect.” 4 Just as our everyday understanding of the objectifications that surround us is always attained by reference to these common conventions, so historical understanding can only be attained by reference to these social commonalities, that is, by “locating the individual manifestation of life within a common context.” 5 The process of understanding is important for Dilthey’s epistemology. It leads him to raise a question that remains prominent in many later discussions of historical understanding. The question is: how can empathetic historical understanding have a “universally valid” objectivity? 6 On what grounds can a mental process occurring within the subjective experience of the historian be recognized as a valid interpretation of a given historical phenomenon? Dilthey treats this question of objectivity as one not of methodology but of philosophy. He does not answer it by offering a procedure that if followed by historians would secure the validity of their interpretations. He answers it by an ontological argument that, in his view, guarantees the validity of the re-created past experiences of others in a historian’s mind. Dilthey here posits the identity of the subject and object of knowledge. In this view, understanding is a universal mode of cognition that is actualized in the historical flow of lived experience, and in that respect both the subject and the object of historical interpretation are identical. As Dilthey puts it: The primary condition for the possibility of historical science is contained in the fact that I am myself a historical being and that the one who investigates history is the same as the one who makes history. … Lived experience contains the totality of our being. It is this that we re-create in understanding. 7 5 While this response to the problem of the validity of historical understanding, as well as Dilthey’s theory as a whole, might seem vague, underdeveloped, even quasi-mystical, his work did much to raise issues that still concern philosophers interested in historical understanding. Max Weber Dilthey’s philosophy of history was part of a wider debate, raging in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, about the nature of the human sciences, their difference from natural science, and the methodologies appropriate to them. This methodenstreit (debate over methods) spanned a range of disciplines across the human sciences. The camp siding with a more historical and interpretive view of the human sciences included, besides Dilthey, the neo-Kantian philosophers Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert and the sociologists Georg Simmel and Max Weber. These thinkers shared the conviction that the human sciences differ fundamentally from the natural sciences in that they require historical understanding. Beyond this shared conviction, however, they each had their own view of the human sciences and of historical understanding. The most influential for the social sciences has proved to be that of Weber. For Weber, a valid scientific explanation is a causal one, but in the human sciences, causality has to assume a peculiar form in that it requires an interpretive dimension. The importance of interpretation follows, for Weber, from the fact that “in the social sciences we are concerned with psychological
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